02150cam a22002537 4500001000600000003000500006005001700011008004100028100002100069245013300090260006600223490004100289500001900330520107500349530006101424538007201485538003601557690009401593700001801687710004201705830007601747856003701823856003601860w5005NBER20161209120250.0161209s1995 mau||||fs|||| 000 0 eng d1 aFarber, Henry S.10aCommon Interests or Common Polities? Reinterpreting the Democratic Peaceh[electronic resource] /cHenry S. Farber, Joanne Gowa. aCambridge, Mass.bNational Bureau of Economic Researchc1995.1 aNBER working paper seriesvno. w5005 aFebruary 1995.3 aThe central claim of a rapidly growing literature in international relations is that members of pairs of democratic states are much less likely to engage each other in war or in serious disputes short of war than are members of other pairs of states. Our analysis does not support this claim. Instead, we find that the dispute rate between democracies is lower than is that of other country pairs only after World War II. Before 1914 and between the World Wars, there is no difference between the war rates of members of democratic pairs of states and those of members of other pairs of states. We also find that there is a higher incidence of serious disputes short of war between democracies than between nondemocracies before 1914. We attribute this cross-temporal variation in dispute rates to changes in patterns of common and conflicting interests across time. We use alliances as an indicator of common interests to show that cross-temporal variation in dispute rates conforms to variations in interest patterns for two of the three time periods in our sample. aHardcopy version available to institutional subscribers. aSystem requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files. aMode of access: World Wide Web. 7aF02 - International Economic Order and Integration2Journal of Economic Literature class.1 aGowa, Joanne.2 aNational Bureau of Economic Research. 0aWorking Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)vno. w5005.4 uhttp://www.nber.org/papers/w500541uhttp://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w5005